The art of getting to the heart of secret recipes revealed

Indian cuisines have suffered because of the absence of documentation of heritage recipes. Imagine all the good things you’ve eaten at Jama Masjid or Aminabad or Bohri Mohalla or Charminar, and then ponder over the prospect of losing them, or seeing their quality decline, because the creators of these famous dishes haven’t bothered to share the recipes in a form that can be replicated by future generations.

The Oberoi Group’s initiative – evocatively christened Rivaayat – to record these secrets therefore is a commendable first move for two wholesome reasons. It gave birth to food promotions that helped us discover forgotten dishes we would have never known about (having tasted some of the originals, I can vouch for the authenticity of the reproductions). More importantly, it was the first honest move by a major hotel chain to take the difficult road to unravel the secrets of the culinary traditions of our old cities.

The idea was mooted by The Oberoi Group’s president, Kapil Chopra, who has been talking about “taking Indian cuisine to the next level”. He’s also admits that people now “relate more” to the cuisine of Old Delhi than to what’s on offer in five-star hotels. Being a man who understands his company’s bottomline as much as the hidden culinary gems of East Patel Nagar, Chopra knows very well that the share of food and beverage sales in hotel revenues is going up mainly because room rates are being squeezed by competition. Consumers, moreover, are getting picky and they don’t mind paying money for a novel experience. And what can be more novel than to be served an experience for which we may not want to trudge through the squalor of our old cities.

Rohit Gambhir, executive chef of The Oberoi New Delhi, reflected the joy of being part of a discovery mission when he recalled the four days that 40 chefs from the group’s hotels across the country spent in a Masterchef Australia setting. For these four days, The Oberoi Gurgaon’s banquet hall was converted into a classroom fitted with 40 industrial ranges – many of these were dusted out of the stores of the Oberoi Centre for Learning and Development ten years after they’d been junked. The gas cylinders required for this operation were banked in an open space at a respectable distance to prevent any catastrophe and connected to the ranges through metal pipelines.

The visiting chefs spent a day each mastering ten recipes from one of the four traditional experts roped in for the initiative – Nazish Jalali and her son, Osama (Delhi); Sweety Singh (Punjab); Nawab Izzat Hussain (Lucknow); Mumtaz Khan and her daughter, Parveen (Hyderabad). To ensure transparency, each expert had to do all the preps in the kitchens of The Oberoi Gurgaon – as they prepped and they cooked, overhead cameras recorded each move of theirs. Each masala was measured – and weighed again after it had been used. Using this method, The Oberoi chefs were able to translate chutkis and mutthis into grams (and teaspoons or tablespoons) by subtracting the weight of each leftover masala from what went out.

For the visiting chefs, there was no respite even after the cooking sessions got over. They had to go out to restaurants and streets to eat out like regular people did. On one of these peregrinations to Old Delhi, they met Mohammad Hussain and had his famous talli murgh (fried chicken).

It was heavenly, and they learnt, as they ate out of his hand, that Hussain has nine daughters, all of whom he has married off in style, and he owns nine buildings in the neighbourhood. They weren’t surprised, for Hussain sells 400-500 kilos of fried chicken per day. What surprised me, though, was the perfection with which the chefs at The Oberoi New Delhi were able to replicate Hussain’s talli murgh. Hussain won’t be poorer because of this knowledge transfer; he has only become more famous.